The undiscovered possibilities of voice marketing; “Alexa, can you add…?”

“Alexa, what is the weather forecast today?” is probably the most frequently asked question to a smart speaker. The exponential rise of these home assistants is astonishing. Looking at the US, almost 60 million people own approximately 157 million smart speakers together in 2020. These numbers mean that almost 60 million US citizens use their Alexa or Google assistant regularly, which offers interesting marketing potentials. Therefore, the possibilities of this newly accepted technology are enormous, and the big tech companies realize that. Amazon and Google are fighting each other with their friendly voiced Alexa and Google Assistant to win a prominent spot in your home and become your assistant, but who will be the first to implement voice marketing?
To understand this new way of connecting with consumers, it is important to know how voice assistants search on the internet. Voice searching is quite diverse from a regular web search. The big difference between the two is the result of your search. Instead of showing lots of pages with the optional solution, smart speakers only display one result. This contrast is a unique benefit and pitfall at the same time, because imagine if your shower gel pop-ups first on the grocery list of 60 million US-citizens. The increase in sells would be enormous but, unfortunately, showing only one result is a big risk as well.
Microsoft stated that the technology must win the full support of the consumer first before it is possible to add voice advertisements. Because of the one result search method, it is important to show the right recommendation or product instead of an advertisement. Since the beginning of Google, the company is using a self-learning algorithm to find the perfect search results online. This is done by Semantic Search, which can be explained as a method that uses context and entities to give meaning to the words. The context part of this method focuses on the location and the search history of the consumer. The entities give the meaning of the words so that the algorithm knows that “Donald Trump” is a person, and “New York” is a city.
The big challenge that Google and Amazon have with voice search is the complexity of the search words. This complexity will make Semantic Search even more important because searches will change from using keywords to full natural sentences that start with “who” or “what” and end with a question mark. To recognize these questions, google and amazon must process natural languages and longer sentences, which are harder to understand for the algorithm. This difficulty combined with the one search result gives a higher chance for mistakes, which eventually will lead to less consumer trust. Because of this, Multinationals are still careful with transforming their home assistants into cash cows.
Still, the easiness of using voice search indicates that home assistants will become a big part of our daily lives in the future. The increment of consumers that use smart speakers enables a high development rate of the voice technology. Therefore, online playing cards will be reshuffled, which gives a lot of new opportunities for companies. Companies have to adjust their SEO-strategy to more structured data with natural written content that meet the full sentences asks by consumers to their home assistant. Only then, your company will be able to take advantage of 60 million US citizens who ask Alexa to add shampoo to their shopping list. Thus, the time to act is now, because it is not the question if Google and Amazon will roll out this marketing feature, but when.